Heritagizing Local Cheese in China: Opportunities, Challenges, and Inequalities
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This is the accepted version of a an article accepted for publication in Food and Foodways published by Taylor & Francis. Published version will be made available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2017.1420354 Accepted version available from: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/25066/ Heritagizing Local Cheese in China: Opportunities, Challenges, and Inequalities JAKOB A. KLEIN Department of Anthropology, SOAS University of London, UK ABSTRACT: The author discusses the heritagization of local foods in China, based on his ethnographic research into the production, marketing, and consumption of rubing or “milk cake,” a goat milk cheese made in Yunnan province in the southwest of the country. The article draws attention to regional and ethnic dimensions to heritagization processes in China, sheds light on the relationship between heritagization and state projects of agricultural modernization, and raises critical questions about the opportunities and challenges for smallholder producers to create and capture value in the growing market for Chinese local heritage foods. TITLE FOR RUNNING HEAD: Heritagizing Local Cheese in China Scholars have begun to explore the reinvention of local foods in China as symbols of cultural heritage, a process which researchers working elsewhere have called the “heritagization” of food (Grasseni 2014; West 2016). Across the People’s Republic of China (PRC), products ranging from the ham of Jinhua, Zhejiang province (Wang 2012) to the teas of a holy mountain in Hubei province (DeBernardi 2015) are being packaged, branded, and certified as edible exemplars of the distinctive nature-cultures of their places of production. Studies reveal how such reinventions of food have affected Chinese local foodways (Tan and Ding 2010; Mak 2014). However, the question of who is, and who is not, able to capture the value created through food heritagization in China has not received adequate attention. Further, scholars have not interrogated the role of the socialist state in shaping unequal opportunities for value creation and capture, or explored how heritagization may 1 This is the accepted version of a an article accepted for publication in Food and Foodways published by Taylor & Francis. Published version will be made available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2017.1420354 Accepted version available from: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/25066/ relate to wider state projects vis-à-vis the agro-food system. Additionally, researchers investigating the reinvention of Chinese local foods have concentrated on the economically affluent eastern seaboard. They have paid little attention to the regional dimensions of culinary heritage production in China, or to how the creation of culinary heritage and the unequal access to opportunities that emerge from it may be affected by regional or ethnic divisions and stereotypes (though see Wu 2014). In this article, I add to the literature that explores how heritagization is affecting Chinese foodways. Further, I draw attention to regional and ethnic dimensions of heritagization processes, address the relationship between heritagization and state projects of agricultural modernization, and explore the opportunities and challenges for smallholder producers to create and capture value in the market for Chinese heritage foods. I aim to encourage a more critical discussion on the heritagization of Chinese local foods and its implications for smallholder farmers, particularly in China’s ethnically diverse, often marginalized borderlands. By revealing some of the convergences and divergences between China and both the European Union (EU) and emerging economies such as Mexico, this study also contributes to our comparative understanding of food heritagization processes. My discussion centres on an ethnographic investigation that I carried out into the production, marketing, and consumption of rubing or “milk cake,” a goat milk cheese from Yunnan province in China’s southwest.1 Milk cake is made in and around Shilin county, near Yunnan’s capital, Kunming, and in Dali municipality in the province’s northwest (Figure 1). Relatively unknown outside these areas, recently attempts have been made to brand the cheese as a “typical,” “traditional,” and sometimes “ethnic” local product. I concentrate on rubing production and branding in Shilin and on its consumption and marketing in Kunming. Rubing from Dali is discussed only insofar as it bears upon the Shilin case. 2 This is the accepted version of a an article accepted for publication in Food and Foodways published by Taylor & Francis. Published version will be made available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2017.1420354 Accepted version available from: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/25066/ The study is based on two months of field research on rubing, conducted in March- April and July-August of 2012, and funded by the British Academy (SG-111559). It also draws on four months of food-focused ethnographic research I carried out in Kunming between 2006 and 2009. Most of my time in 2012 was divided equally between Kunming and Shilin. In July, I also spent five days studying dairy foods in Dali, and two days in Beijing talking with staff and managers in Yunnanese restaurants. In Kunming and Shilin, I spoke with people in wholesale markets, wet markets (i.e., covered or open-air markets retailing fresh meats, vegetables, and other perishable foods), supermarkets, restaurants, dairy companies, goat breeding companies, and government agencies. My research in Shilin was facilitated by officials and staff in the Shilin County Veterinary Station. They offered rich insights into goat farming and cheese making, provided access to official reports, and took me on tours of local enterprises. Official contacts are vital for foreign researchers in rural China, and it is undeniably the case that my perspectives and research findings were shaped by these officials-cum-veterinarians. Through contacts built up during previous research in the region, I was also able to meet farmer-cheesemakers independently of the Veterinary Station. I visited five farmer- producers, watching them make cheese and asking questions of them and other villagers on topics ranging from production methods to market conditions to local eating habits. I also interviewed people from seven urban Kunming households, including people I knew from previous visits and new contacts made through snowballing. I asked these, broadly middle- income, interviewees about their current and past practices of shopping, eating, and cooking milk cake. The interviews were informal, lasted from thirty minutes to over an hour, and were not audio recorded. The research language was Mandarin. HERITAGIZING CHINESE LOCAL FOODS 3 This is the accepted version of a an article accepted for publication in Food and Foodways published by Taylor & Francis. Published version will be made available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2017.1420354 Accepted version available from: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/25066/ Local foods have a long history in China, and attempts to reinvent Chinese local foods as heritage products frequently build on earlier promotions of such foods by states and local elites, and draw on long-standing understandings of the relationship between local soils and water, food, taste, bodily health, and place-based identity (Swislocki 2009; DeBernardi 2015; Tan and Ding 2010). Some of these themes are significant in the case of Shilin milk cake, but to understand the reinvention of this food and its significance for local actors, we need also to have a sense of the forces currently driving food heritagization in the PRC – described in this section – and of the party-state’s attempts to modernize the agro-food system – the focus of the next section. In part, the current popularity of local foods may be viewed as a response to rapid urbanization and an intensified, semi-industrialized food supply system plagued by food safety scares (Yan 2012; Klein 2013a). Local specialty foods speak to an urban, middle-class nostalgia for an imagined rural past, supposedly marked by greater trust, environmental purity, and dietary health (Park 2014; Wu 2014; Mak 2014). The nostalgic craze for culinary heritage is reflected and furthered in popular media such as A Bite of China (Shejian Shang de Zhongguo), a seven-part TV documentary series devoted to local foods. The emphasis in the immensely popular series, aired by state television in 2012, is on craft production and the embeddedness of craft foods within local agroecosystems and cultures of commensality. The heritagization of Chinese local foods also reflects China’s engagement in a global “cultural economy,” in which claims to “heritage,” “tradition,” and “authenticity” are used by producers, state actors, and others to add value to local foods, attract tourists, investors, and prestige, and generate regional and national pride (West 2016; DeSoucey 2010). This engagement is apparent in the scramble by Chinese regional governments to promote their allegedly unique cuisines (Klein 2013b); in China’s signing of UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage; and in two new geographical indication 4 This is the accepted version of a an article accepted for publication in Food and Foodways published by Taylor & Francis. Published version will be made available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2017.1420354 Accepted version available from: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/25066/ (GI) programs, established following the country’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization. Like the EU’s Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) and Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) programs (De Soucey 2010), Chinese GI schemes seek to legally protect the link between foods and localities, emphasizing (to varying degrees) the sourcing of raw materials from the designated area and the use of traditional production methods, and giving certain producers the right to use place names in their marketing and branding (Wang 2012). China’s GIs have often not been recognized by domestic consumers and may have had little positive influence on food quality (ibid.; Zhao et al. 2014). Still, they have become popular among local governments as a tool to promote local brands.